Fable, Emblem, Poem, Performance : Renaissance Word and Image Tales

Renaissance artists and writers, including Leonardo, Bramante, and Michelangelo, challenged themselves with the composition of original word and image tales of hybrid nature in the form of fables, emblems, performances, and poems. Being considered as secondary efforts in respect to their public portfolios, these fragmentary expressions have been interpreted by the critics as recreative works aimed at courtly consumption; however, they have a great scientific potential and might offer precious insights into their authors’ processes of reasoning. The project will employ digital technologies, such as TEI Publisher, IIIF, and Virtual Reality, to analyze recurrent patterns in fables, emblems, poems, and performances, by examining their sources and aims toward the creation of a shared hieroglyph language made of literary, artistic, and scientific terms. I claim that these forms of expression serve their authors to explore the divide between nature and technological advancement and they concur in the redefinition of the traditional hierarchies of disciplines. The project will consider textual, visual, and performative components in the original works as belonging to the same aesthetic enterprise to uncover their authors’ thought processes. The following questions will guide the research: How did Renaissance word-and-image tales develop? What are their sources? Which are their functions and formal breakthrough? Which relationship did Renaissance artists have with writing and humanists? What can textual, performative, and visual narratives tell us about the early modern intellectual, visual, and material culture, and what are their implications more broadly? The project is divided into 3 subprojects. By reconstructing the circulation of words and images in the early modern workshop, Subproject 1 will focus on the archetypes and filiations of fables to investigate the sources and material features of word-and-image tales and trace their evolution to better understand the different traditions informing the artists-writers’ though and creative process. I claim that fables, emblems, performances, and poems are transdisciplinary modes of research, and argue that texts and illustrations from Aesopic fables are their primary sources, which are reworked with contemporary literary and scientific didactic traditions and empirical observations. Subproject 2 will examine emblem expressions to investigate their performative character and intermedial transformation by tracking the cultural exchanges between artists and writers in the creation of word-and-image tales through the reconstruction of the workshop and court environment. The main theses are that artists and writers employ word-and-image tales to develop their public commissions with innovative languages of political communication as collaborative transdisciplinary works; furthermore, their literary effort becomes a subversive research method toward the exploration of scientific issues and the cultural opposition of technological advancements and natural processes. Subproject 3 will analyze the relationship between word and image in poems by artists recognized as writers in humanistic circles to spell out the common literary education of artists and humanists and foreground their effort to both express their social distress and argue for higher social positions for themselves and their disciplines by means of literature. Furthermore, it will shed light on the creative process in the Renaissance, a model that will then be useful to reflect upon the condition of contemporary artists and writers. The project situates itself within the main research areas of early modern word and image, and material culture studies, by contributing to the current debate on visual culture scholarship within the digital humanities. Through interdepartmental cooperation within the Université de Genève and collaborations with Cambridge University and Katatexilux company for multimedia reconstructions, among others, the project hopes to have an interdisciplinary impact as well as produce an invaluable research dissemination output to a broader audience. The final outcomes would be the publication of a limited editions series, a monograph, scientific papers, a program of local and international conferences, a performance and exhibitions, and an interoperable, durable, and scalable digital database that incorporates digital editions, Virtual Reality reconstructions and exhibits – which not only explores Renaissance artists and writers’ transdisciplinary modes of investigation, but it also opens to multiple uses across different forms, media, and fields of study.

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